Carnivore Read online

  The area had already been cleared of enemy combatants, so we weren’t in any immediate danger, and we decided to search the buildings.

  We found an Iraqi air force bunker full of 2,000-pound bombs. Standing orders were to dispose of enemy ordnance, so we decided we were going to blow the place up. We wired one of the bombs with a block of C4, put a five-minute time fuse on it, and drove as fast as the Carnivore could handle, which at that time wasn’t very fast at all. Did I mention that there were fifteen hundred 2,000-pound bombs in that building? Not the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.

  We were maybe half a mile away when it went off. It looked like a nuke, with a mushroom cloud and everything. I could see a purple pressure wave chasing us, flipping over BMPs like they were nothing.

  “Faster, drive faster!” I yelled.

  Sully was struggling with the back hatch and got it latched right before the blast wave hit us. It nearly flipped us over, probably would have if we’d been turned sideways to it. It blew windows out 23 miles away. There were Hind-Ds (large Soviet helicopters) on the airfield, and it destroyed them. We couldn’t even find their rotors. MiG jet fighters were rolled 200 yards across the runways. All the buildings on the base were leveled, leaving just one giant crater the size of a big high school.

  “What did we do?” Sully asked in awe, looking up at the giant mushroom cloud. “What did we do?” The shock wave from the explosion gave him two black eyes.

  Minutes later several U.S. helicopters cautiously flew into the area, radiation detectors going. Command honestly thought a nuclear bomb had gone off. We couldn’t exactly claim ignorance of what had happened, because there we were, one lone Bradley limping slowly away from the blast zone. There was so much debris in the air that command grounded all the helicopters in the area for a while.

  Sergeant Christner was the first person from our unit to come roaring up, wondering what had happened and hoping nobody was injured by whatever had happened. He looked past us, at the mushroom cloud now a mile high, and then back at me. “What the hell was that?”

  Since we were officially following orders, we didn’t get into too much trouble, but after that a Corps-wide, theater-wide order went out for all of Iraq: troops were not to destroy any more munitions.

  I did the math, in case you’re wondering: fifteen hundred 2,000-pound bombs equals 3 million pounds of high explosives.

  For two weeks or so I was in charge of security at the largest oil refinery in Iraq. It was just south of Baghdad, but when I was there it was more of a fuel distribution point than it was a refinery. It was supposed to be running 24/7, but the plant manager was having some problems. If the truck drivers arrived in the afternoon, coming in from Turkey and Syria and all sorts of places, they were refusing to drop off their loads until the next morning, and it was really jamming things up. I told them that I was going to start shooting them if they didn’t unload their fuel when they arrived, and apparently they believed me, because they started unloading their fuel at night. The plant was able to keep operating 24 hours a day, and the plant manager absolutely loved me.

  They were also having problems with employees stealing fuel. Their drivers would stop on the road and sell the fuel to civilians for a higher price instead of going to where they were supposed to drop it off. I would send patrols up and down the highway, and if we found any of the fuel trucks we would grab the drivers, threaten them, and send them off to the supply point. We would run over civilians’ fuel cans in the Bradley. I don’t know if the employees were doing that third-world steal-everything-that-isn’t-nailed-down crap before the war, but I put a stop to it while I was there. When the Army pulled us out of there and replaced us with another unit, that plant manager actually cried.

  The doctors did surgery on me when we were in Baghdad, trying to remove the bullet in my leg. They weren’t able to get it out, and I ended up with a big hole in my leg for a while. I couldn’t walk on it for a while, and at the time Crazy Horse was doing a lot of house clearings. Sully found a wheelchair somewhere, and I sat in it with an M4. While the rest of the troop would be kicking in the front door, Sully would push me in the wheelchair over to one side and say, “I think you can get a good shot at anybody coming out the back from over here, Sergeant Jay.” It was funny as hell.

  The 4th Infantry Division was up north of us in Balad, and they were getting hammered. They’d just arrived in Iraq and were trying a gentler, hearts-and-minds approach to combat or something, and it wasn’t working. Not only were they getting beat up, they were hardly inflicting any casualties on the enemy. So command sent us up there.

  Balad is about 90 kilometers northwest of Baghdad along the Tigris River. Balad is in the heart of the “Sunni Triangle,” but most of its population is Shiite. In 1982, Balad hosted an assassination attempt on Saddam, and he came down hard on them. The Republican Guard killed hundreds, if not thousands, and Saddam installed Ba’ath Party loyalists in local government. We were based out of Balad Air Base and inherited a new Commanding Officer, Colonel Henry. The Colonel flat out said he didn’t believe that we’d killed all the people we said we’d killed and ordered us to bring back the bodies the next time we were in an engagement. Our Troop Commander, Captain Brett Bair, thought that was a completely fucked-up order, and none of us had ever heard of such a thing—you counted bodies, you didn’t bring them back.

  We were on our first patrol in the area late one night at full blackout, and I was enjoying the scenery through the night vision. There were groves of date palms and vineyards, plus lots of canals and small villas. Pretty, yes, and every one of them a potential hiding place for insurgents. It was maybe 2 A.M. when Geary spotted some dismounts.

  “Sir,” he came over the radio, “I got people up here on the berm behind the irrigation canal. I got weapons. There’s at least twenty of the fuckers.”

  Everybody slewed their turrets in that direction and we spotted them. There were about 15 or 20 of them on a small berm about 200 yards away. Through the thermal sight I could see they were dressed in typical Fedayeen attire: baggy pants, head scarves, and belts of ammo. They always had belts of ammo draped over their shoulders, whether there was a machine gun around to use it or not—I’m pretty sure they thought it made them look cool. They also had AKs and other weapons, and they were looking around. They could hear us, but they couldn’t see us.

  “Contact right!” Captain Bair called over the radio. We were waiting for the order to fire, but the captain had something a little more fun in mind. At his signal, everybody pivot-steered right and charged the dismounts, firing everything they had. Two whole scout platoons, 13 Bradleys in all, in line, firing 25 mm HE and coax at two dozen Fedayeen or insurgents or whoever they were. They never knew what hit them.

  Standing in the hatch, I had a great time shooting on full auto the M16 I’d taken from Saddam’s palace. I looked down inside the turret and saw that the Lieutenant was scanning back and forth inside the turret, holding the trigger down on the coax like he was shooting shit, but it was still on Safe. He heard my gun going off and thought he was shooting. I had to arm the gun for him to shoot, so he didn’t get any guys when it first began.

  Williams had a malfunction with the Casanova’s main gun and announced over the net, “Switching to coax.” A few seconds later he had a coax malfunction, and announced, “Switching to TOW.”

  He fired one TOW missile, which hit in the middle of the insurgents, throwing bodies everywhere. Then he fired another one. We threw enough ordnance downrange to dispirit an Iraqi battalion, which means it was complete overkill for two dozen dismounts. The engagement lasted a lot longer than it should have, because we kept pounding them.

  The Iraqis had been positioned on a berm on the far side of a canal. When we finally stopped shooting—and were confident Williams was done launching missiles—all we could see through the thermals were a bunch of hotspots on the ground. As we arrived at the canal we turned on our headlights, dismounted, and searched for survivors
—and bodies for the Colonel. I spotted someone still moving with an AK and shot him a couple of times. When we had finished clearing the area, Sully went looking for a body bag.

  We’d never needed one before, so it took him a while to find it, but he finally brought out the one bag we had on board. Along with guys from a few other crews, we lifted a body into the bag and added as many assorted body parts as could fit. We ended up with parts from about seven guys in that bag, two left legs, five or six hands. It looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s bag when we were done. We completely filled that bag, and it took about six of us to lift it onto the hood of my Bradley, where we strapped it down.

  Once inside the base we rolled up to the squadron headquarters and I headed inside to track down the Duty Officer, who was Captain Kim. I knew Colonel Henry would already be in bed, but I needed to find out what to do with the body bag.

  “I’ve got the bodies that the Colonel wanted. What should I do with them?”

  Kim followed me out and took a look at the body bag. “You’ve got to take them to the morgue,” he told me.

  I said, “Look, I’ve been up for three fucking days, I’m not going to wherever the morgue is. You wanted the fucking bodies, they’re here.”

  He just looked at me, said, “Take them to the morgue.”

  “Where the hell is it?” I had no idea.

  “You go find it,” he told me, and headed back inside. So I called the Troop Commander and told him the situation.

  “Sir, what should I do?”

  Captain Bair was more than a little pissed at us having to bring back bodies to prove we weren’t inflating our BDA to begin with, and riding around with a body bag strapped to your hood doesn’t do anything for troop morale. “Dump ’em,” he told me.

  “Roger that,” I told him. I walked around to the front of the Bradley and cut the straps, and the body bag fell right onto the steps of squadron headquarters. We drove over to our area and parked, and I lay right down and went to sleep because we had been up and moving for days. I lay down out in the open, because it was a zillion degrees out, and it seemed like only a few minutes later when I felt someone kicking my boot.

  “Get up, Crazy Jay.”

  I cracked my eyes to see Sergeant Major Brahain, the Sergeant Major for the squadron, standing over me. He was just shaking his head. I sat up and tried to clear my head.

  “Crazy Jay. Crazy, Crazy Jay. We gotta talk, Crazy Jay.” He had a very interesting and entertaining speech pattern.

  I said, “Hey, Sergeant Major, how’s it going?”

  He said, “Crazy Jay, y’all killed some people last night.”

  “Yeah, Sergeant Major, we killed a few people.”

  He said, “You put ’em in a bag.”

  “Yeah, Sergeant Major?”

  “Crazy Jay. You done a lot for this squadron, you’ve killed lots of people, but you cain’t be dropping dead guys off on the steps of squadron headquarters like it’s a mafia hit. We just cain’t have that happen. Ya understand what I’m saying, Crazy Jay?”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant Major, I was tired.”

  “I know, Crazy Jay, I know, but it cain’t happen again! What possessed you to put dead people on my steps?”

  I said, “Sergeant Major, I didn’t want them here,” indicating the Carnivore.

  He looked at me for a while, then said, “That’s a good damn answer. But I’m doing everything I can to keep the Colonel from court-martialing you.”

  Captain Bair came up then. “Sergeant Major, that was my idea. I had him do it.”

  The Sergeant Major looked at the Captain, then at me, and said, “Crazy Jay, you’ve got evabody pullin for ya, but you just cain’t do that shit. You gotta get your shit together and think about what you’re doing. Damn!” And he walked off. He was one hell of a good Sergeant Major.

  The Commander did tell me to do it. He told me to drop them off on the steps of headquarters because the asshole Colonel wanted to see some fucking bodies. I just probably shouldn’t have taken that order so literally.

  That firefight and the body bag incident were written up by a reporter we had embedded with us at the time, Rita Leistner. She was a freelancer who had snuck into Iraq through Turkey and met up with the Cav while we were in Baghdad. She originally showed up as a photojournalist with the Daily Mail of London. She rode up to Balad with Crazy Horse and was in the back of Geary’s Circus Freaks during the firefight after which we filled up the body bag. She liked the idea of having armor between her and the bad guys, and we liked her Iridium satellite phone, which we could use to call home. Her article on Crazy Horse, “The Burning Tip of the Spear,” appeared in The Walrus, a Canadian magazine in early 2004. She thought Sully looked so young and innocent, she called him “Little Cow Eyes.” Soprano actually ended up on the cover of the magazine, shirtless.*

  Crazy Horse had gone into Iraq from Kuwait, and we didn’t have much but the uniforms on our backs. Our mail hardly ever caught up with us, and we got shit for care packages. The 4th Infantry Division, on the other hand, came into Iraq straight from Germany, and they had their mail chain set up properly. A day or two after the body bag incident I had a cute medic from the 4th ID walk up to me when I was sitting on the back of the Carnivore.

  She said, “Sergeant Johnson, are you the one they call Crazy Jay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I told her. And she gave me a box.

  The box was full of CDs, stuffed animals, and all sorts of candy, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and shaving cream and razors, which I instantly kicked underneath the ramp—I hadn’t shaved in three months and wasn’t about to start. Apparently I created a bit of a legend with the body bag stunt, and the 4th ID was very appreciative. They kept coming up to our guys and handing out extra candy and goodies from their care packages.

  * * *

  * “The Burning Tip of the Spear,” by Rita Leistner. The Walrus, February/March 2004.

  CHAPTER 19

  STAGE 3

  For five days in June, command had us guarding one end of a bridge over the Tigris in Balad. We were part of Operation Peninsula Strike, the biggest operation in the area since the fall of Tikrit in April. Our job was to check the cars for any weapons or large sums of cash, which might be used to support the guerrillas.

  We had a small abandoned schoolhouse at our end of the bridge. The 82nd Airborne had the other end, and they were not happy. We’d been driving Bradleys everywhere, but they’d had to walk or ride like cattle in the back of deuce-and-a-halfs, in temperatures hotter than the sun. Those dudes hated everybody. People who came over to us from that side of the river were beat black and blue, and they had boot marks on their cars.

  You’d think that with a war going on and armed, annoyed soldiers running roadblocks, the people who needed to cross the bridge would be polite and respectful. Shit.

  Guys would curse us, spit at us, try to drive past us, refuse to get out of their cars, you name it. We couldn’t hurt them, and we didn’t have a jail to hold them, so we put them in time-out. That’s what we called it. We’d make them stand in the corner, sit like the iron chair with their knees bent and back against the wall, put a book on their head and make them stand like that, or make them stand with their arms out and their palms up. That’s all we could do to them, so we were doing stupid high school shit. For a very short while I gave the ones with bad attitudes shovels and sent them out back to dig holes, because that was how I always punished my crew. The first time I walked back there to watch them dig I saw the Iraqis crying and mumbling in Arabic as they worked the shovels.

  “Why the fuck are these guys crying?” I asked someone.

  I was told, “They think you’re going to kill them and bury them. That’s what Saddam did. They think they’re digging their own graves.”

  Oops. Okay, lesson learned—no more digging holes for the Iraqis as punishment, although it turned out to be a pretty damned effective time-out technique. Those guys were damned polite after that.

  One day a car
came across the bridge with two drunk guys in it, one of whom kept saying, “I love Saddam!”

  Forest Geary was working as my wingman that day. It was about 130 degrees in the shade, and Geary had about had his fill of idiots for the rest of his life. “Really, asshole? You love Saddam?”

  The guy spit at Geary, so without thinking he reached into the car and grabbed the guy and shook him, and said, “Who do you love now, bitch?”

  The guy said, “I love Saddam” again, and tried to roll the window up on Geary. He caught Geary’s hand in the car and the car started moving forward. Oh fuck—so we rammed the car with the Carnivore, and when I say rammed it I mean we ran over the engine compartment.

  Geary pulled the guy out of the car. He dragged him to the side of the road, pinned him down, and started hitting him. I pulled Geary off him and said, “That’s enough! That’s enough. You can only hit him so many times after he punks you out.”

  “He didn’t punk me out! I’m punking him out!” Geary was still screaming at the guy, so we separated them and moved the guy down to a little schoolhouse. We were going to hold him in time-out. Geary probably could have used a time-out, too.

  We called the medics to come over and look at the guy. All he’d suffered were a few bruises. There weren’t any serious injuries because Geary is just a little wiry guy, and his punch was like a girl slap—or at least that’s what I told Geary all the time. We loved to egg each other on.